Oxford v. Cambridge

At the end of a boat race one crew always sits up straight, breathing hard but smiling. That is the winning crew. In the other shell, which has come exactly the same distance, the men fall over their oars, exhausted. Some of them faint. That is the losing crew. Last week on the Thames it was the Light Blue crew of Cambridge that sat up straight, the Oxford crew (Dark Blue) that fainted.

"And well they might," said a gentleman standing in Prime Minister Baldwin's party to one of the equerries of King Amanullah of Afghanistan who was looking through binoculars at the Oxford men falling backward and forward in the narrow shell. Behind the barges filled with notables, butchers, bakers, and fishmongers, decorated with ribbons of various colors, sat on the roofs of taxicabs, shaking their heads. Even those who had bet on Cambridge felt a pleasant pity for the losing crew and felt they could afford that pity. Calm, strong, confident, Cambridge took the lead in the first five strokes, wore the Oxford crew out in the first mile, finished ten lengths ahead at the end of the four-and-a-half-mile course from Putney to Mort Lake. Oxford has not won the race since 1923.